US President George Bush yesterday accused critics of the war in Iraq of trying to rewrite history and of undermining American forces.

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges," the president said in a Veterans' Day speech.

Bush said that foreign intelligence services and Democrats and Republicans were convinced at the time that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

"Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war," Bush said.

But he said a Senate investigation had found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's assessment.

AN 18-month-old boy has become the 21st person in Thailand to catch the H5N1 bird flu virus, but is recovering in hospital, a senior health ministry official said yesterday.

The boy lives in a house in the Bangkok suburb of Minburi, where three fighting cocks and a chicken also lived, said Dr Thawat Suntarajarn, director- general of the Department of Communicable Disease Control. All the birds had died, and soon after the boy was taken to hospital with flu symptoms.

Laboratory results received yesterday confirmed that the boy had H5N1 bird flu.

The boy is now in a hospital in Bangkok, and his symptoms were described as not severe.

Twenty-one people in Thailand have caught bird flu since it swept into Asia in late 2003, and 13 of them have died.

There have been four cases this year, one of them fatal.

GERMANY'S biggest political parties yesterday reached a deal to form a coalition government, a senior Social Democratic official said.

The deal seals an accord that will put conservative Angela Merkel in charge of attempting to revive the economy while taming its huge budget deficit.

"We want to make more of Germany and we, the two big parties, want with these policies to win back people's trust in the ability of politicians ... and show that we can do something for our country," Merkel told reporters.